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“... we have to wait for the family biography and for the definitive study by Alan Crawford. Meanwhile Fiona MacCarthy has written The Simple Life, an excellent introduction to C.R.A. and his most ambitious experiment. This was the Great Move of 1902, when he led his band of 150 craftsmen from the East End of London to an unknown land, Chipping Campden in the ...”

“... one could always be highlighted at the expense of the other: in this shrewd, stylish biography, Fiona MacCarthy tells us that Stanley Baldwin once gave a speech on Morris which managed to omit all mention of his political activities, which would be rather like seeing Dickens only as a sanitation reformer. Less drastically, one can view Morris’s ...”

“... glow of John Betjeman’s ardour. This is just the sort of ‘facile and patronising view’ that Fiona MacCarthy, herself one of those who queued up to curtsey in 1958, is determined to counter. Nearly fifty years on, having spent the intervening decades hoping that nobody would find out about her shamefully smart past, she has decided to tell all and ...”

“... letters that made Burne-Jones, by his own account, ‘scream with bliss’. In her new biography Fiona MacCarthy describes a series of ‘brilliantly scurrilous cartoons’, now in the British Library, composed in mocking response to Swinburne’s involvement with the flamboyant American actress Adah Menken. Something of this Burne-Jones – the keen ...”

“... us because of what we already thought we knew. Judging by the immediate critical response to Fiona MacCarthy’s biography, the appetite for Byron’s life is indeed sharpened by all the stories we already have. In the Guardian the historian Kathryn Hughes thought that ‘Byron was indeed someone special,’ but ‘not, perhaps, because of his ...”

“... were at the time more or less silent witnesses. Among those Thompson should not have ignored are Fiona MacCarthy’s The Last Curtsey (2006), a witty account of coming out at a time when debs were turning into dolly birds, and Elisabeth Luard’s My Life as a Wife (2008). Luard’s book casts a sharp sidelight on the scene Thompson needs to evoke. Her ...”

“... because it has suddenly become fashionable to paint furniture and stencil drawing-room walls. Fiona MacCarthy writes in her introduction to the Crafts Council catalogue that people have been trying to put Omega into a cupboard ‘partly because they could not see what else to do with it and partly because it made them very angry’. Although she ...”

“... three-volume Byron: A Portrait, gives the summer in Geneva only 20 pages out of nearly 500, and Fiona MacCarthy’s more bracing recent biography, Byron: Life and Legend, gives it just over 30 pages in her slightly longer book.* Perhaps Byron is always ill-served by biography because his ‘tempestuous’ life seems to explain the poems in a way that ...”